In the Dark
by Andacus
Summary: The first time they meet she’s more hands than lips and it’s like escape. Dean/Faith


They meet in the dark and they stay there, lies and secrets cradled close to their chests like the fragile, ugly things they are.

The first time they meet she's more hands than lips and it's like escape – refreshing and fast. Dean knows what she wants because it's frighteningly familiar, but he's happy to oblige. He can't believe his luck.

Smoke and whisky mark the occasion as they exhaust themselves together, sweat and tobacco and breath, pure lust tinted with shades of old desperation.

She's gone by sunrise.

***

Dean never expected to see her again so when she comes in all fists and anger, looking like Lara Croft or some shit, he's caught off guard and it costs him. It won't kill him, but it'll leave a scar. He doesn't realize that symbolism until years later when the scar's long gone, cast away by forces of fate.

Dad shoves off, his excuses overly transparent and his mood no more dower than normal, but no better either. No one really cares anyhow. They're barely in the room before she's got his dick in her hands, still more hands than lips and he remembers how much he liked that. This time there's awareness but not familiarity, there's a strange new knowledge that hovers around them.

He's not deterred and neither is she. They struggle for control, both grappling with more than just the other person, both trying to hold on to that little bit of anonymity that made the last time so great, but it's gone. It has slipped away, replaced by a crack in each of their armor.

They come together, rocking and meeting in battle. There's no rhythm in this, only conflict and misunderstanding, but damn if they don't both enjoy themselves.

She smokes and checks her voicemail. He still doesn't know her name.

"Faith," she says, and it so ironic that she can't be lying.

"Dean," he offers. A sacrifice for a sacrifice.

She flips her phone closed, draws deep on her cigarette and looks him over. He's up and moving now and he knows she's appreciating him, naked and worn from all the battles he's fought tonight. She says nothing, doesn't have to.

He's gone by morning.

***

Dad drops off the face of the Earth two weeks later and Dean can think of nothing to do for days, at least -- they all run together a bit and he looses count. He keeps thinking that someone will call him back and say they've found him or Dad'll drag his ass back in the door, the stories longer and more unbelievable than ever. But it doesn't happen..

He lets the Impala walk all the way to California, taking his time. He's stalling and he's ashamed, but he can't find a good way to do it. He wanders into L.A. looking for some R&R before he finally man's up and goes to Palo Alto.

It's a shitty hole in the wall of a place with poker in the back and an off duty cop keeping the peace for a few extra bucks. There's nothing legal here and he feels at home.

Dean orders a beer and sulks at the bar, not looking for company, but wanting it. A body brushes his arm and she orders another round and leave the bottle, but Dean's hardly paying attention.

"Hi there Stud," she says and he's genuinely surprised to see her.

He grins, loving his luck for the first time in a long time. The beer lands on the bar with a thud, like a period in the run-on sentence that was the last few weeks of his life. He's leaning in her direction, all flattery and sincere eyes. He'd love little more than to talk her naked.

"Oh, you don't have to turn on the charm for me, I'm a safe bet." And she kisses him, this time more lips than hands and that's even better. It's a good kiss, one of promises and ambiguity and he knows he's getting laid tonight more from that than from her words.

Faith steps back and says she has to talk to her friends, but the word is used with an unfamiliar mixture of emotion and it's clear that they're not her friends, not exactly.

She swaggers away, all hips and ass and her friends look suspicious. There's a man with a scowl to match Sammy's and a blond woman who's been glaring, but it doesn't seem to matter to Faith, who saunters back over and leads him out into the night.

His façade cracks at some point amid the groans and swears and blasphemy and he's only too aware of the change on her face. She lets him cover her, lets him fuck her. There's no battle for dominance, like before, and if he were self-aware enough he'd have appreciated that. But Dean doesn't see himself like other people see him and he can't understand it just then, buried deep inside her and in himself.

She's still there when he wakes up and he just catches her slipping a knife in her boot through his half lidded eyes, but she sees him watching and says, "Fuck, I'm hungry."

They eat omelets and coffee black and she talks more than she has before. It's nice and Dean doesn't like it just for that fact alone. But he laughs without meaning to and he does his own fair share of talking, not about anything important, of course, just war stories. And hers impresses him, though he's never heard of a Slayer before and her vampire lore doesn't jibe with his.

She kisses him goodbye and she tastes like coffee and ketchup and all the greasy spoons of his childhood.

She's gone by noon.

***

He finds her number scrawled across a pair of his underwear in red marker. It doesn't say her name, but he knows who wrote it.

Sam doesn't ask, though he does raise his eyebrows in that way he has. They're too busy for weeks and weeks and he looses the paper he copied the number onto, but he does remember to make a note of Slayers in Dad's journal.

It occurs to him one night while he's mindlessly peeling the cotton panties off some skinny blond that meeting up with Faith all those times is a little weird, but she follows a similar path so he can't (or won't) chalk it up to more than coincidence. His brother would tell him it's fate or destiny or some other crap, but Dean doesn't buy that and Sam doesn't get to know about this anyway. Dean's not at all sure why not and that bothers him more than he likes.

***

The next time he sees Faith, she's standing in a cemetery, looking like she's been playing mud football with God Himself. But Dean's been to Hell and back and had his own mud-flinging with God, so he's not overly impressed, but he appreciates the irony.

Sam rushes to her and asks if she's okay, but Dean takes his time, hangs back several yards. He knows better. He's seen her fight before, heard her tall tales and if she's on her feet she's still fighting, whether it's with a demon or herself is irrelevant, as long as she's still fighting.

"_Hello_," Faith says, somehow lecherous and mocking at the same time. "How about we put those biceps to work, Jolly Green." She hands him a duffle and shoulders one of her own before hoisting up a broken old trunk and stomping toward the parking lot.

"You gonna help, Dean?" She asks, probably just to prove she knew he was there.

"Nope," he says because he just likes to be difficult these days.

She grins at him and when she turns back to Sam, his face is scrunched up in such a comical display of confusion and surprise that she laughs out loud.

"You must be Sam. I'd say I've heard a lot about you, but I'd be lying."

Dean falls a few feet behind them to avoid Sam's piercing glare, but he can't suppress the bits of southern gentleman that have rubbed off somewhere between seven and twelve and Texas and Arkansas. He relieves her of the trunk and grunts under the weight.

"The hell you got in here? Cement?"

"Condoms," she teases and Sam coughs, caught unawares.

"You have a car or something?" Dean asks after a short internal war over her well-being and his upholstery. "You look pretty beat up." He's not sure which side won.

They reach the lot just as she turns to look him up and down, long and thorough, but she doesn't leer like she might have were they in a bar or somewhere marginally less filthy. Faith looks across to the Impala and grins. "Lucky for both of us, I don't have a car here."

The hotel room is cheap and tacky and the bed is horribly stiff, but other things are occupying their attention. Faith's more observant than he remembers and no sooner is his shirt off than she's stopped to stare at him. He's different now, battle scars all concentrated into one hand-shaped monstrosity, bones straightened, calluses softened.

"Whoa," is all she says, but it's expectant, like a cue that he's supposed to pick up on. Dean says nothing and she can't ignore what she's seeing so she asks, "What the hell happened to you?"

"Some seriously screwed up shit," he answers and closes the space between them. She lets him.

They sleep through breakfast, but Faith buys Dean and Sam lunch on what she calls the "company card" and he's reminded of the way she said "friend" the last time he saw her. He doesn't know why these things bring out that unemotional tone she's perfected, but he thinks he understands it.

They eat pizza in a chain joint with some silly name and she dips hers in ranch dressing, which disgusts Sam.

When they drop her back at the cemetery, she kisses Dean long and slow and almost looks like she hates herself for it.

They're gone by dusk.

***

She catches up with him on purpose this time. She's not panicked, exactly, because Slayers don't get panicked, Dean supposes, but there is unease in her every movement. They find her on their doorstep, pacing, clothes dirty and torn, her hair tangled and matted. She's unhurt, but not unharmed.

Sam ushers her inside and starts coffee in their tiny dingy kitchen. Two months ago they rented this little old house in this little old town - an experiment in stability. Dean can't decide if he likes it or hates it but he knows that he hates Sammy for taking so quickly to it.

"Nice place," Faith says, her eyes a little less anxious now.

"Yeah," Dean says without really meaning it.

Sammy comes back in a minute later, coffee steaming from a huge yellow mug, his face an image of concern, and Dean scowls because Sam is so clueless when it comes to this girl. But he doesn't know her like Dean does.

She starts talking and Dean only follows the parts about "Goddamn demons" and "dumb dead bastards."

Sam starts in with the explanations and the answers she never asked for and Faith is squirming only a little. Dean knows it's unintentional – Faith makes big moves and says big words and does big things, but she only does those because she wants you to see them. It's the little things that she does that she doesn't want to.

"What?" He asks and he doesn't bother hiding the suspicion in his voice.

Faith stops fidgeting immediately and scowls, her face going hard and blank. "What, what?

"What're you not telling us?"

Her face closes off, solid and hard, and she immediately bolts for the door. Dean's there right behind her and somehow manages to stop her from leaving, though only barely. When she looks at him, he can't read anything in her expression and he knows that's because there's so much she's hiding.

"Look," she says, jerking her arm free of his grasping fingers, "I just needed a place to crash, okay? I've got reinforcements coming tomorrow, so it's no big."

"Like hell," Dean says, his voice hard, but even that won't entirely cover up the notes of concern that he's trying to silence. "We'll help. We're good at that." Maybe he can pass this off as just another job; he's always concerned about them, right?

One look at Sammy's face and he knows he can't.

"Fine," she snaps and marches back over to the couch, acting like she doesn't care one way or the other.

"Why don't you fill us in?" Sam says in his _I want to be helpful_ voice and Dean rolls his eyes for what feels like the hundredth time that night.

It's a reluctant story, but Faith tells it and Sam makes appropriate sounds at the appropriate times. It's not a remarkable story, not by their standards, but it is more than Faith can handle alone, that much is obvious. Dean finds himself happy she came to find them and he hates that.

****

She makes herself comfortable on the couch, pretenses not lost on anyone, and when she climbs in his bed at three in the morning, Dean's not at all surprised.

They wake midmorning and before he's even fully alert, she's pulled him inside her, clawing at his skin and making uncharacteristic pleas. It isn't exactly desperate, but it's needy and it throws him. He plays along even though it makes him feel a little out to sea, because he's a little needy too.

They find Sam listening to some kind of horrible techno music and cooking mac and cheese. They eat at the small table, Faith drowning her meal in black pepper and her nerves in whisky, though she'd never admit that she had nerves of any kind other than steel.

They kill the rest of the day with planning and strategizing, until none of them can take it anymore and they break for a few hands of poker. Sam never wins, but Faith and Dean share the pot between them.

At dark, they pile into the Impala, Faith claiming shotgun and Sam sulking in the back. Her friends or colleagues or whomever they are, aren't at the diner yet, so they get a table and coffee and no one drinks any of it.

It's another fifteen minutes before that same blond woman Dean had seen in L.A. walks in. There's some guy masquerading as Billy Idol with her and a thin redheaded woman. The man stops a second and then holds open the door, like he's casing the place and keeping the exits clear. But then a woman with a hood over her head enters and Dean can just make out what appears to be blue or purple in her hair and are those tattoos?

Faith makes a noise beside him like she's irritated and he thinks she muttered something about overkill, but he's not sure.

****

Two days later and the nest of demons is cleared out. It wasn't hard, not with Illyria there, which was something of a strange experience, even after all that they'd seen.

The others leave and some small place inside him mourns that.

Faith says goodbye on the front step. She kisses him and somehow they end up back in his bed, more whispers than movements and it's entirely too frightening. But when he wakes up and she's still sprawled across him, he doesn't remember the fear.

She leaves three weeks later, all loud words and big excuses.

She's back by sunrise.


End file.
